CVE-2015-9351

Feed Them Social <= 1.6.9 - Arbitrary Shortcode Execution

2015-02-02 00:00
James Hooker

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 1.7.0
Affected Plugin
Feed Them Social – Social Media Feeds, Video, and Photo Galleries
Affected Version
<= 1.6.9
CVSS
9.8Critical
Weakness type
CWE-94 · Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection')
CVE
CVE-2015-9351
View all Feed Them Social – Social Media Feeds, Video, and Photo Galleries vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2015-9351 is a critical-severity Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection') vulnerability in the Feed Them Social WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.6.9. It carries a CVSS score of 9.8 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity; high confidentiality, integrity, availability impact). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 1.7.0; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed February 2015, reported by James Hooker.

Vulnerability Overview

The feed-them-social plugin before 1.7.0 for WordPress has possible shortcode execution in the Facebook Feeds load more button.

Technical Analysis

The vector marks this flaw as remotely reachable over the network, with low attack complexity — no special timing or configuration is needed, and no privileges on the target site, and no interaction from a victim user. A successful exploit has high impact on confidentiality, integrity, availability — full site compromise territory.

CWE-94: Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection')

Reaching this weakness in Feed Them Social <= 1.6.9 takes a caller who can reach the endpoint. Code injection means input from a request reaches a language construct that evaluates code, so the attacker's text is executed rather than treated as data.

The injected code runs with the web server's privileges, giving the attacker the same access to the database and filesystem as WordPress itself. For Feed Them Social the fix is 1.7.0: builds <= 1.6.9 are affected, anything from 1.7.0 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 1.7.0, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Feed Them Social: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. Classes like this one can leave something behind, so the staged malware scanner is the second half: it looks for dropped files and modified code rather than for the request that created them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Feed Them Social 1.7.0 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Scanner
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2015-9351https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/67c7e67e-3e68-4f49-9d81-fa0ed451376ehttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2015-9351

Related records

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